The announcement of the death of Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus and Nobel Prize in medicine, took 24 hours to be taken seriously after its publication by FranceSoir.
” think against yourself “, we know the famous sentence of Péguy, dear to Edwy Plenel, founder of the Mediapart site. Thinking about or rather compensating for one’s own prejudices, sometimes totally founded, but which can cause us to miss the truth by verifying and cross-referencing sources: this is undoubtedly what should be meditated on in journalism schools from the announcement of this death of Professor Luc Montagnier by the FranceSoir site.
Admittedly, FranceSoir no longer has much to do with the illustrious daily newspaper founded by Pierre Lazareff. He has often been implicated for his involvement in conspiracy theories. It served, for example, as a launching pad for the documentary Heist, where Professor Montagnier testified alongside Didier Raoult and Christian Péronne to explain that the Covid was a great manipulation. A theme that was then taken up at will by the antivax and which leads in a certain way to the convoy of freedom these days.
Verification time needed
Information from a dubious site is therefore by nature dubious. Does it deserve to be verified? Yes of course, and one can be surprised at the time it took to do this, even if the family, the Neuilly hospital and the sphere of influence of the antivax did not help much in this. Release even recounts that voices listened to among antivax, like Richard Boutry, affirmed on Twitter on Wednesday that “ Professor Montagnier is not dead “, when the lawyer Fabrice Di Vizio noted that this announcement has ” not subject to any denial “.
Verification was certainly not easy, but it was necessary if one wanted to avoid even 24 hours the trap in which many media say mainstream fell ignorant of the truth. If we wanted to demonstrate the confinement of a journalistic caste in its own beliefs and maintain that only anti-system media tell the truth, we could not do otherwise. Especially since the director of FranceSoir, Xavier Azalbert, came on Thursday morning to testify on Sud Radio.
Basically, the death of Luc Montagnier is somewhat the reverse of the erroneous announcement of the death of Martin Bouygues by the AFP in 2015. As it was the AFP, all the media, including LCI held by Bouygues, took up the dispatch on this fake death without trying to verify it. There, no one takes up the info from FranceSoir because it is FranceSoir and Luc Montagnier himself can mislead with his eccentric theories on the Covid. However, it is because FranceSoir and the Nobel Prize were linked that there was a chance that it was true.